T HE Victorian age was a time of extraordinarily rapid change and
of often heady confidence in the seemingly inexorable
progress of civilization, but also of bewilderment and anxiety
as traditional social and religious faiths and structures were displaced. It
was also an age of impressive achievements in poetry, even though
many Victorians believed that the most striking characteristics of their
age rendered it peculiarly unpoetical. As England achieved ever greater
wealth and international power, as railroads and telegraph wires crisscrossed England and the Empire spread around the world, and as science and technology produced ever new wonders, few doubted the
overall benefits of progress and advanced civilization, but such progress
itself seemed antithetical to poetry. At the start of the Victorian period Thomas Babington Macaulay, a poet himself as well as one of the age's
most tireless celebrants of material advance, offered the increasingly
common argument that "as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

Not only did knowledge seem to limit the range of imagination, but
as scientific and historical discoveries began to undermine traditional
religious faith, knowledge paradoxically produced uncertainty in the
form of religious doubt--a "damnèd vacillating state," as Tennyson
called it, that was considered utterly incompatible with inherited
Romantic notions of the poet as an inspired seer, and as a moral teacher
and guide. Religious doubt was in part produced by new scientific discoveries and discourses that incontrovertibly disproved the Biblical
account of creation. Discoveries in geology, especially, disproved the

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